Glory Be!

Ten years ago this month, when Denver hosted the All-Star Game at Coors Field, Westword mocked the Beanie Baby craze by burning, dismembering, torturing and otherwise going all Dick Cheney on one of the 51,000 Glory Bear Beanie Babies given out to ticket holders at the game — and sharing the "Gory Glory" details on our nascent website. At the time, collectors — who were scooping up Glory Bears for hundreds of dollars on eBay and in newspaper classifieds — were shocked by our treatment of such a precious commodity, but just a year later, poor Glory was only worth about $20. And today you can find the bear online for just a buck.

As New York prepares for the 2008 All-Star Game, we feel it's finally time to reveal that Glory was later rescued by guilt-ridden Westword employees, who agreed to foot the bill for the numerous surgeries and other experimental treatments that the bear needed.

We can now report that Glory is living in seclusion in a secret location, where he is pampered with good food and daily massages. And while we thought that our original story, photos and video of Glory's harrowing travails had been lost in cyberspace, we recently stumbled across that material, along with recent photos of Glory living in luxury. We're sharing them here — because those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And no one would ever want to resurrect the Beanie Baby fad.

Fit to be fried: As reporters headed into the Pepsi Center Tuesday for the second — and final — media walk-through, a volunteer was handing out doughnuts. Fried doughnuts.

You'd better believe that members of the Democratic National Convention Committee, which organized the walk-through, are fit to be fried over the ribbing they've taken in the national press, what with both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times mocking the "Lean 'N Green" guidelines — including a ban on fried foods — created by the Denver 2008 Convention Host Committee for caterers and restaurants. But it was the media that had the heartburn last month, after the DNCC pushed back the date for the second walk-through with just a week's notice. And as it turned out, the timing of this briefing wasn't much better, since the DNCC is scrambling to accommodate the Obama campaign's request on Monday that the final evening of the convention, including Barack Obama's acceptance speech, be moved to Invesco Field at Mile High. A day later, the convention officials who've been working on Pepsi Center arrangements for more than a year didn't have a lot of solid Invesco information.

But they did have doughnuts. And in fact, deputy CEO for public affairs Jenni Engebretsen assured hard-hearted (and hardened-arteried) reporters that the convention would have "all the fried food you can stomach."

Which should also make Michelle Obama happy, since French fries are her favorite guilty-pleasure food. Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown found that nugget while preparing the "Food Fight" edition of his monthly newsletter, which includes this classic line about cooking Rocky Mountain Oysters: "an alternative preparation, lightly sauteed, is not recommended."

For more discussion of Colorado's unofficial foods, go to the Café Society blog. But first, get a taste of this: One local hotel will not be serving pineapple during the convention — because the carbon footprint of this fruit is too big. Even if it is from the state where Obama was raised.

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